The 1619 Project Comes for the Second Amendment

David Harsanyi    

Left-wing academic Carol Anderson’s new book, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America, is all over the news. “The Second Amendment is not about guns — it’s about anti-Blackness, a new book argues,” reads a CNN headline. NPR claims that the author has uncovered the racist “roots” of the Second Amendment.

This is wishful thinking. The Second is an attempt — much like the 1619 Project — to reimagine history in purely racial terms. The result is tendentious polemic that suffers not only from a paucity of historical evidence, but from a dishonest rendering of the facts we do know.

...But to make the claim that the Second Amendment was added to the Constitution to placate slave owners, Anderson is impelled to take numerous shortcuts. Take, for example, this pivotal sentence in the book:

“In short, James Madison, the Virginian, knew ‘that the militia’s prime function in his state, and throughout the south, was slave control.’”

The author frames the quote as if Madison, the author of the Bill of Rights, had said it himself — or, if we’re being generous, that it’s a fair representation of his views. When you follow the book’s endnote, however, it leads to a 1998 paper titled “The Hidden History of the Second Amendment,” written by anti-gun activist Carl T. Bogus, who shares Anderson’s thesis. It is his quote. Nowhere does Bogus offer any sample of Madison declaring, or even implying, that slave control was the impetus for the Second Amendment.

In another instance, again relying on Bogus’s paper, Anderson declares that among his “great rights,” Madison discusses only “trial by jury, freedom of the press, and ‘liberty of conscience,’” and that the right to bear arms does not even “make the list.” This, too, is extraordinarily misleading, as the quote comes from a Madison speech proposing the Bill of Rights in June 1789. Early in his argument, Madison mentions, in passing, some of the “great rights,” before literally listing — “fourthly,” in fact, right after freedom of religion and assembly — the “right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed, and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country: but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, shall be compelled to render military service in person.”

...Civil-rights leaders of the 19th and early 20th centuries also lamented that the right to self-defense was denied them. Fredrick Douglass reacted to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 by editorializing that the best remedy would be “a good revolver, a steady hand, and a determination to shoot down any man attempting to kidnap.” The late-19th-century civil-rights leader Ida B. Wells argued that one of the lessons of the post–Civil War era, “which every Afro American should ponder well, is that a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give.” T. Thomas Fortune, another black civil-rights activist of the era, argued that it was with a Winchester that the black man could “defend his home and children and wife.”

...For most of our history, self-defense was also seen as an immutable right that existed with or without the sanction of the state. “Remember that the musket — the United States musket with its bayonet of steel — is better than all mere parchment guarantees of liberty,” is how Douglass made the case for natural rights. He did it better than many of the Founders. Certainly, he did it better than Anderson.

READ ENTIRE REVIEW

Also see Historian Falsely Claims The Second Amendment Was Created To Protect Slavery

Anderson’s attempt to make racism the reason behind the establishment of the Second Amendment falls in lockstep with Marxist curricula like the New York Times’ 1619 Project. The goal isn’t merely to just falsify our history, but to do so in a way that breeds further division within the country. Rather than divide us by economic status or class, this kind of “racial Marxism” seeks to pit Americans against one another based on race.

Ultimately, the propagation of such an ideology will sow discord throughout the nation...